Brian Wong’s Silicon Valley story is impressive and inspiring. The 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Kiip, Inc., a 4-year-old startup that aims to redefine mobile advertising, recently addressed a group of large-enterprise CIOs on the topic of innovation. The takeaway: The constructs of innovation may have more to do with mindset, culture, and execution than with company size, industry, or location.

Promoting adoption is widely recognized as instrumental to extracting the full value of ERP systems. But user adoption generally lags because many ERP systems are so difficult to use. Wrapping a “user experience platform” around an ERP system that tailors it to specific roles and functions can go a long way toward making ERP systems more intuitive and employees more productive.

Fox Sports aims to transform traditional sports media with the launch of Fox Sports 1, an irreverent new cable sports channel, and digital media is playing a central role in the shake-up. In this inside look at Fox Sports 1, Pete Vlastelica, Fox Sports’ senior vice president of digital, discusses digital media’s pervasive influence on the new network and its role in creating a rich, 24/7 cross-platform experience for fans and advertisers.

Beyond discussions of design-led thinking and free markets, harnessing “user empowerment” entails concrete, technical challenges. These include implementing composite application frameworks, agile development approaches, and next-generation development languages. IT shops will also need new practices for deploying back-end system integration and managing vendors, contracts, and assets.

OfficeMax CIO Randy Burdick puts the burden on his IT staff to explain why business users should not be permitted to adopt a technology that will improve their performance. But he also emphasizes the importance of educating workers on proper usage, strengthening the security infrastructure, and addressing the process implications of user empowerment.

Workers today expect business technology solutions to be as elegant and useful as consumer products. And they don’t need to rely on central IT to get what they want. CIOs ought to accept the new reality and work with, not against, their empowered users. To join the movement, they must understand users’ needs, permit them to source external solutions, and adopt a product-centric mindset.

Embracing user empowerment does not require a wholesale scuttling of corporate IT, only that leadership envisions the digital future and delivers the empowered present. CIOs should understand and deliver capabilities that not only engage their users, but improve how the work gets done. If done well, it should be a framing force that permeates the entire IT delivery model, positively redefining the brand of IT in the business.

User engagement with enterprise software is critical if companies want to realize a return on their investments in these systems. Improving user engagement with enterprise software requires focusing on the user experience: understanding how employees in various roles work with these systems on desktops, mobile devices, and the web, and providing them with a completely new, integrated, intuitive, and customized interface that helps them work more effectively.

In a business setting, “gamification” refers to designing solutions using gaming principles (fun, play and passion) for everything from back-office tasks and training to sales management and career counseling. To get started, businesses should establish clear and simple objectives, understand the community of users, take advantage of mobile and social technologies, and look for new ways of engagement.

Sophisticated user engagement solutions require deep technology elements to realize the shift from making passive look-and-feel improvements to fundamentally supporting how work is performed. These underlying technologies include integration, data management, a business rules engine, user-interface platforms, and commerce tools.

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more.

Related Deloitte Insights

Consumers increasingly expect a convenient, rewarding customer experience when they dine out. How can restaurants use technology and analytics to begin creating the restaurant of the future for these next-generation customers? Get to know them, adapt to their patterns of interaction with the world, and build meaningful digital experiences for them.

Exponential technologies, whose performance relative to cost and size is accelerating rapidly, increasingly enable organizations to promote positive social impact while also deriving business benefits. In this video, Deloitte Consulting LLP’s CTO discusses how using exponentials for social good can enhance a CIO’s legacy.

Blockchain has the potential to disrupt organizations by transforming the way institutional trust is established between parties in transactions. CIOs need to determine whether they expect to defend against this technology, or whether a business case exists for embracing it.

Deloitte Insights Video

Consumers increasingly expect a convenient, rewarding customer experience when they dine out. How can restaurants use technology and analytics to begin creating the restaurant of the future for these next-generation customers? Get to know them, adapt to their patterns of interaction with the world, and build meaningful digital experiences for them.